A good Puritan mother loved and cherished her children, but many died young and she was supposed to be stoic about it. A good Puritan mother was kind but stern in rearing good Christian children, but she was silent and ...

When she was 10 years old, Louisa May Alcott in 1843 was taken to live at a commune called Fruitlands by her high-minded but improvident father. Fruitlands was a utopian experiment, a model of love and unselfishness for the rest ...

Mothers have always had to balance competing demands, and some of those who did it best made history. Mindful that Mother's Day is around the corner, we bring you more than six New England mothers who left a mark on ...

Margaret Fuller, who spent her life protesting injustice, died at the age of 40 in a shipwreck off New York Harbor while onlookers watched from the shore. She was America’s first feminist, first female literary critic and first woman foreign ...

The gravesites of such revolutionary heroes as Paul Revere and Nathan Hale are well known and well marked, but where are the revolutionary heroines buried? The New England Historical Society searched for the stories of courageous women willing to sacrifice ...

Lydia Chapin Taft was the first woman to legally vote in New England. The year was 1756, and the issue of taxation without representation was a hot concern in the American colonies. Boston minister James Mayhew was preaching about the ...

On August 14, 1768, the Daughters of Liberty cheered from windows as the Sons of Liberty paraded through Boston to commemorate their riots against colonial officials three years earlier. They were far more than cheerleaders, though they did rally the ...

  Inventing the bra was possibly the least interesting thing Mary Phelps Jacob did in her life. She was called Polly Peabody during her first upper-crust marriage and Caresse Crosby during her scandalous second. She and her husband Harry Crosby ...

Hepsibeth Hemenway was a mixed-race laundress and cook who never ventured far from Worcester, Mass., but she fascinates people more than 150 years after her death. An unlikely portrait of Hepsibeth in old age hangs in the Worcester Historical Museum. ...

Irish landmarks commemorate the history of Irish immigrants in places you might not expect throughout New England. There’s more to Irish-American history than the Great Hunger, the Kennedys and ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ Irish Catholics came to New England along ...